A blog about running
that has metamorphosed
into one about life in general.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Questions and Concerns at Pacific Hospital - Part 4

COLLEGE HOSPITAL OF LONG BEACH

The change in ownership of Pacific Hospital of Long Beach from
Healthsmart Pacific to College Health Enterprises was delayed for a week but
the employees were able to start reapplying for their jobs two weeks before
that. It appears that the new official name is now College Hospital of Long
Beach. With the change in ownership, the psychiatric unit which was being
managed by the Memorial Counseling Associates has had a sudden drop in the
number of inpatients because the doctors from that group have lost their admitting
privileges. See, MCA has their own intake department and doctors group which
funnel patients coming from Pacific Hospital's emergency department and other area
hospitals towards the 3 psych units Pacific (in this case, College) Hospital
has. College Health Enterprises have their own intake department called Access
Services and their own admitting doctors. With the loss of MCA, the psych units
have lost a lot of patients due to discharges and needs to reestablish a new
patient base before the census goes up again. In hospital parlance, census is
the number of patients who are being treated on the unit.

The consequence of having a low census is that
the staff have to take turns getting cancelled from work due to staffing
ratios. The hospital only needs a certain number of staff to cover a certain
number of patients. Hospital workers know about this and I may be
overexplaining myself for the sake of making it clear for non-healthcare
workers. On the first official day of College Hospital running the show, it
just so happened that it was my turn to get cancelled, which hasn't happened in
approximately 2 years. Thus, I got a call from the nursing supervisor at about
5:30 p.m. on Monday notifying me so, because the census in the unit I work in,
which has a capacity of 36, had dropped to 18. Ergo, not only are we in danger
or being laid off, but while waiting for word if we are going to be rehired or
not, we are already losing income because of the low census. Our first hope is
that census rebuilding won't take too long by reassigning the psych patients
who show up in the emergency department to the College Hospital doctors. The
second hope of course is to be rehired.

There
should not be a similar problem with medical patients though, since there won't
be a change in the admitting privileges of the doctors. The only change they
are having is that Molina Healthcare will be managing the medical units. But I
could be wrong since I'm not privy to that kind of information. Meanwhile last week, a representative from the labor union
which College Hospital Cerritos employees belong to, contacted me via email after
reading my blog, asking questions which I didn't know the answers to.

This wasn't meant to be a series of posts but it had become
so as things have evolved. Here are the links to my previous posts regarding
this matter:

2 comments:

I have been gone for a couple of weeks and before that the only College Hospital doctor I've seen admitting is Dr. Valdez. MCA doctors probably can still admit their patients there but MCA is no longer managing the psych units.

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About Me

I started writing this blog to chronicle my devastating running injury in October of 2008. It has since turned into something I didn't expect: stories and anecdotes about everyday life. On 7/26/11, I retitled this blog from noeldlp.blogspot.com to aboutlifeandrunning.blogspot.com. I remain permanently injured with PTTD on both ankles but I keep on trying to run nonetheless. I'm not sure if it's passion or insanity. You be the judge.